The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (25 page)

"This rig-out you're wearing now? God Almighty," she says. "Anybody would think you were going on for a hundred."

"I like it," I say. "They told me it was flattering."

"Flattering, is it? Well. Well," she says. "I suppose it is, after living in the dead's clothes all this time."

"What?"

"The Kinsellas' young lad, you dope. Did you not know?"

I don't know what to say.

"That must have been some stone they rolled back to find you. Sure, didn't he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank and drown? That's what they say happened anyhow," she says.

I keep on walking and try not to think about what she has said, even though I can think of little else. The time for the sun to go down is hours from now, but the day feels like it is ending. I look at the sky and see the sun, still high, and, far away, a round moon coming out.

"They say John got the gun and took the hound down the field but he hadn't the heart to shoot him, the softhearted fool."

We walk on between the bristling hedges, in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Farther along, the same heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road. Soon we come to the place where the black dog is barking through the gate. "Shut up and get in, you," she says to him.

It's a cottage she lives in, with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs and red-hot pokers growing tall. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker. There's a baby in a highchair. He lets out a cry when he sees the woman and drops a handful of marrowfat peas over the edge. "Look at you," she says. "The state of you."

I'm not sure if it's the woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn't even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.

I don't know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave, but just as I'm deciding what to do the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the doorframe. "Good evening all," he says.

"Ah, John," the woman says. "You weren't long. We're only in the door. Aren't we only in the door, child?"

"Yes."

Kinsella hasn't taken his eyes off me. "Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you to take her home."

"It was nothing," the woman says. "She's a quiet young one, this."

"She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her," he says. "Are you ready to come home, Petal?"

I follow him out to the car, where the woman is waiting.

"Were you all right in there?" she says.

I say I was.

"Did she ask you anything?"

"A few things, nothing much."

"What did she ask you?"

"She asked me if you used butter or margarine in your pastry."

"Did she ask you anything else?"

"She asked me was the freezer packed tight."

"There you are," Kinsella says.

"Did she tell you anything?" the woman asks.

I don't know what to say.

"What did she tell you?"

"She told me you had a little boy who followed the dog into the slurry tank and died, and that I wore his clothes to mass last Sunday."

When we get home, the hound comes out to the car to greet us, and I realize that I've not yet heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off, stumbling a little, to milk. When he comes inside, he says he's not ready for bed. He puts what I realize is the boy's jacket on me.

"What are you doing now?" the woman says.

"I'm taking her as far as the strand."

"You'll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella," she says. "And don't you go without the lamp."

"What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?" he says, but he takes it anyhow, as it's handed to him.

There's a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As he does, I realize that my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go, so I won't have to think about this. It's a hard feeling, but as we walk along, I settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be.

When we reach the crossroads, we turn right, down a steep hill. The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully, making the dry boughs rise and swing. It's sweet to feel the open road falling away under us, knowing that we will, at its end, come to the sea. Kinsella says a few meaningless things along the way, then falls quiet, and time passes without seeming to pass, and then we are in a sandy, open space where people must park their cars. It is full of tire marks and potholes, a rubbish bin that seems not to have been emptied in a long time.

"We're almost there now, Petal."

He leads me up a hill, where tall rushes bend and shake. Then we are standing on the crest of a dark place where the land ends and there is a long strand and water, which I know is deep and stretches all the way to England. Far out, in the darkness, two bright lights are blinking.

Kinsella lets me go and I race down the dune to the place where the black sea hisses up into loud, frothy waves. I run toward them as they back away, and run back, shrieking, when they crash in. Kinsella catches up and takes my shoes off, then his own. We walk along the edge of the sea as it claws at the sand under our bare feet. At one point, he holds me on his shoulders and we go in until the water is up to his knees. Then he walks me back to the tide line, where the dunes begin. Many things have washed up here: plastic bottles, sticks and floats, and, farther on, a stable door whose bolt is broken.

"Some man's horse is loose tonight," Kinsella says. "You know the fishermen sometimes find horses out at sea. A man I know towed a colt in once and the horse lay down for a long time and then got up. And he was perfect.

"Strange things happen," he says. "A strange thing happened to you tonight, but Edna meant no harm. It's too good, she is. She wants to believe in the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding out is to trust them, hoping she'll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is."

I don't know how to answer.

"You don't ever have to say anything," he says. "Always remember that. Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."

He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh.

Everything about the night feels strange: to walk to a sea that's always been there, to see it and feel it and fear it in the half-dark, to listen to this man telling me things—about horses being towed in from the deep, about his wife trusting others so she'll learn whom not to trust—things that I don't fully understand, things that may not even be intended for me.

As we turn to head back along the beach, the moon disappears behind a cloud and we cannot see where we are going. At this point, Kinsella lets out a sigh, stops, and lights the lamp.

"Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same," he says. "Do you know what the women have a gift for?"

"What?"

"Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what's coming before a man even gets a sniff of it."

He shines the light along the strand to find our footprints and follow them back, but the only prints he can find are mine. "You must have carried me there," he says.

I laugh at the thought of my carrying him, at the impossibility, then realize that it was a joke, and I got it.

When the moon comes out again, he turns the lamp off and we easily find the path we took through the dunes. We stop at the top and he puts my shoes back on and then his own and knots the laces. We turn and look at the water.

"See, there's three lights there now, where there was only two before."

I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are still blinking, but with another, steady light, shining in between.

"Can you see it?" he says.

"I can," I say. "It's there."

And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his.

After a week of rain, on a Thursday, the letter comes. It is not so much a surprise as a shock. Already I have seen the signs: the shampoo for head lice in the chemist's shop, the fine-tooth combs. In the gift gallery there are copybooks stacked high, Biros, rulers, mechanical drawing sets. In the hardware, the lunchboxes and satchels and hurling sticks are left out front, where the women can see them.

We come home and take soup, dipping our bread, breaking it, slurping a little, now that we know one another. Afterward, I go with Kinsella out to the hay shed, where he makes me promise not to look while he is welding. I am following him around, I realize, but I cannot help it. It is past the time for the post to come but he does not suggest that I fetch it until evening, after the cows are milked and the milking parlor is swept and scrubbed. "I think it's time," he says, washing his boots with the hose.

I get into position, using the front step as a starting block. Kinsella looks at the watch and pulls down his handkerchief as if it was a flag. I race down the yard to the lane, make a tight corner, open the box, get the letters, and race back to the step, knowing that my time was not as fast as yesterday's.

"Nineteen seconds faster than your first run," Kinsella says. "And a two-second improvement on yesterday, despite the heavy ground. It's like the wind, you are." He takes the letters and goes through them, but today, instead of making jokes about what's inside of each, he pauses.

"Is that from Mammy?"

"You know," he says, "I think it could be."

"Do I have to go home?"

"Well, it's addressed to Edna, so why don't we give it in to her and let her read it."

We go into the parlor, where she is sitting with her feet up, looking through a book of knitting patterns. Kinsella slides the letter onto her lap. She opens it and reads it. It's one small sheet with writing on both sides. She puts it down, then picks it up and reads it again.

"Well," she says, "you have a new brother. Nine pounds two ounces. And school starts on Monday. Your mother has asked us to leave you up at the weekend so she can get you togged out and all."

"I have to go back, then?"

"Aye," she says. "But sure didn't you know that?"

I nod.

"You couldn't stay here forever with us two old forgeries."

I stand there and stare at the fire, trying not to cry. I don't so much hear as feel Kinsella leaving the room.

"Don't upset yourself," the woman says. "Come over here."

She shows me pages with knitted jumpers and asks me which pattern I like best, but all the patterns seem to blur together and I just point to one, a blue one, that looks like it might be easy.

"Well, you would pick the hardest one in the book," she says. "I'd better get started on that this week or you'll be too big for it by the time it's knitted."

Now that I know I must go home, I almost want to go. I wake earlier than usual and look out at the wet fields, the dripping trees, the hills, which seem greener than they did when I came. Kinsella hangs around all day, doing things but not really finishing anything. He says he has no disks for his angle grinder, no welding rods, and he cannot find the vise grip. He says that he got so many jobs done in the long stretch of fine weather that there's little left to do.

We are out looking at the calves, who have been fed. With warm water, Kinsella has made up their milk replacement, which they suck from long rubber teats. They look content lying there in a fresh bed of straw.

"Could ye leave me back this evening?"

"This evening?" Kinsella says.

I nod.

"Any evening suits me," he says. "I'll take you whenever you want, Petal."

I look at the day. It is like any other, with a flat gray sky hanging over the yard and the wet hound on watch outside the front door.

"Well, I had better milk early, so," he says. "Right." And goes on down the yard past me as though I am already gone.

The woman gives me a brown leather bag. "You can keep this old thing," she says. "I never have a use for it."

We fold my clothes and place them inside, along with the Ladybird books we found on the stand at Webb's in Gorey:
The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Ugly Duckling, Snow-White and Rose-Red.
I can remember how the lines go, can match my memory of the words with the words that are written there. She gives me a bar of yellow soap and my facecloth, and the hairbrush she bought for me. As we gather all these things together, I remember where we got them, what was said, the days we spent, and how the sun, for most of the time, was shining.

Just then a car pulls into the yard. I am afraid to look, afraid it is my father, but it's a neighboring man. "Edna," he says, in a panic. "Is John about?"

"He's out at the milking," she says. "He should be finishing up now."

He runs across the yard, heavy in his Wellington boots, and minutes later Kinsella sticks his head around the door. "Joe Fortune needs a hand pulling a calf," he says. "Would you ever run out and finish the parlor off? I have the herd out."

"I will, surely," she says.

"I'll be back just as soon as I can."

"Don't I know you will."

She puts on her anorak and I watch her go down the yard. I wonder if I should go out to help but I come to the conclusion that I'd only be in the way. I sit in the armchair and look out to where a watery light is shining off the zinc bucket in the scullery. I could go to the well for water for her tea. It could be the last thing I do.

I put on the boy's jacket, take up the bucket, and walk down the fields. I know the way, could find the well with my eyes closed. When I cross the stile, the path does not look like the same path we followed on that first evening here. The way is muddy now and slippery in places. I trudge on along toward the little iron gate and down the steps. The water is much higher these days. I was on the fifth step that first evening here, but now I stand on the first and see the surface of the water reaching up and just about sucking the edge of the step that's one down from me. I bend with the bucket, letting it float then sink, as the woman does, but when I reach out to lift it another hand just like mine seems to come out of the water and pull me in.